Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [7]
When I was fourteen, I got tested through a program at the South Boston Boys Club, which was doing some sort of a survey. The test showed that I had an IQ of 145. My brother Johnny had an IQ of 150. My father didn’t get overly excited over those scores. When I was in the sixth or seventh grade I came home with a report card of all A’s and one B. My father gave me a beating and said I wasn’t applying myself. It wasn’t because he cared that much about my education. He was just in a bad mood and my report card gave him a convenient reason to beat me.
As great as it was growing up in Southie in the 1960s, there were some genuinely scary times. Like the November night when I was thirteen and walking home from swim practice at the Boys Club, which was on West Sixth Street. It was around eight-thirty and I was with Richie Faith, who was ten at the time. We were walking through the Old Colony projects, heading toward Patterson Way and Ninth Street, when a guy suddenly jumped out of the bushes we were cutting through and tried to grab Richie. When Richie took off, screaming and running down the street, the guy came at me. I picked up a ten-inch pipe, probably part of a metal fence, that was lying there, and as he came at me, I hit him with it. He fell down, but I kept on hitting him until he staggered and took off.
A few minutes later, Richie, his father, Bill Faith, and my father and my brother Johnny all came running over to where I was. Richie had run up to his house a block and a half away and told them what was going on. When they got there, I was standing there, still holding the pipe. “Are you all right?” my father asked. I nodded, and he looked around and saw that there was blood everywhere, all over me, all over the ground. “What happened?” he asked. “Where did the man go?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just took the pipe and kept on hitting him.”
My father kept looking at the blood and said, “Jesus Christ, there’s so much blood. You must have killed him.”
My father took me and together the five of us followed the trail of blood across the street and toward the schoolyard. The trail just ended abruptly in the middle of the street, so they figured the guy must have had a car or something that he got into and took off. Then they took Richie and me home. When we got to our house, I got cleaned up and ate, and we all talked about what had happened. Then my father told me to go to bed. I was lying in bed in the room I shared with Johnny and could hear my parents talking in the next room. “The little bastard has no fear,” my father was saying to my mother. “I worry about him, Peg.”
The truth of the matter was, I had been scared to death. My father wanted all of us kids to be able to take care of ourselves, but he meant with our hands. He wasn’t big on weapons. If I hadn’t had the pipe, I would have used my hands, but the outcome probably wouldn’t have been so good for me. And I hadn’t had the option to run like Richie did. I certainly hadn’t wanted that scene to happen that night. I would have been happy to have walked home with no problems, eaten a peanut butter sandwich, and gone to bed. But since it happened, it was a good thing the adrenaline had been flowing and I was able to keep hitting the guy until he took off and left me. I was also lucky they were doing the fences over and I’d been able to get hold of that metal pipe. I hadn’t been a hero that night. I had just used my natural instinct to survive.
Another night, my brother Johnny, who was sixteen at the time, was also coming home from the Boys Club when he saw a car parked on West Sixth Street with its lights off. As Johnny walked by, he could see that the